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Apple Assistant?

Big rumor is that Apple is going to announce something called Assistant, which is a much improved version of voice recognition. Apple purchased a company called Siri in April of last year. Siri describes itself as a company that makes not just voice recognition but artificial intelligence. Everyone's been kind of waiting to see what Apple would do with Siri and apparently it's being announced today. Siri's co-founder, while insisting he has no specific knowledge of what Apple is doing with the technology, says in a new interview:

Make no mistake: Apple's 'mainstreaming' Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I'd go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event.Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We're talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.

Yeah, you're right, it is a good idea to be dubious whenever a tech executive uses phrases like "groundbreaking event" and "paradigm shift" but if it gets us closer to the way Picard interacted with the computer on the Enterprise, that's great.

About the author

John Moe is the host of Marketplace Tech Report, where he provides an insightful overview of the latest tech news.